Sunday, October 25, 2015

One of the fun parts of making cards is all the scraps
generated that I can’t seem to throw away.

One of the frustrating parts of making cards is all the
scraps generated that I can’t seem to throw away.

Yup. I have a Pinterest board dedicated to card ideas for
utilizing paper scraps, precisely because of my scrap hoarding problem. Really,
we pay good money for our beautiful papers, so why throw way those pieces that
are sure to come in handy later? Am I
right? ;)

For the second time in a month, I actually have utilized
scraps; though this time I made a set of four cards using mostly left over
elements & scraps from my spooky forest cards from my last blog post. I was
left with strips of Authentique & DCWV Halloween cardstock from cutting the
papers down to 4.25” x 5.5” card size, extra aluminum foil strips &
Hershey’s Kiss foil wrappers stamped with “Spooky”, and Echo Park Paper Co.’s“Happy Halloween” die cuts of witches’ boots, bats, and spider webs. The die
cuts were the result of an evening spent getting rid of the pile of cardboard
packaging on my desk by continuously die cutting while listening to pod casts.
I ended up with a pile of random die cuts while reducing the pile of thin food
packaging boxes. I felt so productive and considerate towards my
future-card-making-self. However, my husband caught on to the fact that I’m
trying to re-use our food packaging as much as possible instead of throwing it
away, and I now have another pile larger than the first! What a good excuse to
break out my newest, unused die sets from my latest craft supply order, huh?

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

October is one of my favorite times of the year. It
simultaneously represents the promise of harvest season and the fun of
Halloween costumes and shenanigans, while also signaling the final end of
summer and the real transition into winter weather. While I always mean to start autumn or Thanksgiving
cards, I pretty much always get sidetracked by the fun of Halloween cards. It’s
a time of year when no one minds receiving creepy cards, and I enjoy making
creepy cards! This year, I found my eye drawn both to my Oxford Impressions
“Danse Macabre” stamp set and Xcut’s forest Build-A-Scene die set, neither of
which had been broken in yet.

The stamp that really grabbed my eye as the inspiration for
this project was a pair of violin-playing skeleton sisters. I stamped several
of this image on ivory cardstock using onyx black Versafine ink, then used a
sponge to rub some vintage photo Distress Ink over all of the images.

The images needed something extra, so I decided to try
salting the ink for the first time. Just experimenting, I spritzed the sheet of
inked images with water, then sprinkled salt over them and waited for them to
dry. Once dry, I dusted off all the salt and fussy cut my musical skeleton
images. Seeing the end product, I think I probably did not wet the images
enough, but at the time I was concerned about ruining them with too much water.
The end salt effect was subtle, but perfect for my images.

While I waited for the salted images to dry, I die cut the first
layer of forest-scene using cardstock from Authentique’s “Thrilling” 6" x 6" collection
and one of the DCWV Halloween mat stacks, and cut the second layer from black Darice Core’dinations cardstock. I decided to mat all my layers on a kraft card
base, with a 4.25” x 5.5” black cardstock background mat to add spooky depth
with the addition of pop dots.

After laying out my layers, I realized two things: I needed
additional depth on my black background mat, and the front of my card needed
additional embellishment. I solved the first issue by using a bare twiggy
branch from the same “Danse Macabre” stamp set to watermark the image on the
black background mat and the black die cut forest layer using Versamark ink.
Unfortunately, this blended in too much on the background mat once it dried and
didn’t give me the additional depth I was looking for. I re-stamped the branch
image in Versamark ink on the background mats, but this time I wet embossed it
using a black embossingpowder. That did the trick!

The second issue was solved a few days later when my new pad
of jet black StazOn ink arrived in the mail. After digging around in one of my
random scrap stashes (yes, I have more than one), I decided to use my StazOn
ink to stamp on aluminum foil to add a little sparkle to the cards without
clashing with the dark forest scene. I also had some spiders and spider webs
(Echo Park Paper Co.’s “Happy Halloween” dies) already sitting on my desk from
an overly productive random die-cutting session from a couple weeks ago. I
rubbed the die-cuts in black Colorboxpigment ink, and used a “Spooky” stamp
from PinkPaislee/House of Three’s “Phantom” Halloween stamp set* to stamp on
the aluminum foil.

I carefully positioned and adhered my musical skeletons
behind the top die cut forest layer, then adhered it to the black second forest
layer. I glued the overlapping foil sentiment and die-cut spider to the top
left corner of the card front. At some point in the card-making process, I
realized that these were pretty involved cards and would make rather awesome
annual Halloween decorations. With that in mind, after I glued the black
background mat to the kraft card base, I punched two holes about half an inch
in from the top corners of the front of the card so that a ribbon hanger can
easily be added later. I figure that once the recipients are done enjoying the
sentiments inside the card, they can cut the back of the card off and will be
left with a nice hanging decoration. After punching the future-ribbon holes, I
added pop dots around the perimeter and adhered the front two cardstock layers
to the background mat.

As the final touch, I cut lengths of orange ribbon as
decoration hangers to include in the envelope with the cards. The ribbon is a
sentimental touch, having been salvaged from table décor at a friend’s wedding.

*As a side note, this is my first and only PinkPaislee clear
stamp set. This set of clear cling stamps is of very poor quality; I feel like
I’m going to tear each stamp from the amount of force I have to apply to pull
the stamps off the sheet for their first use. So I guess I’m saying caveat emptor
and thank goodness I bought them on sale!